Adapting to Consumer-Controlled Surveillance
Six rules for companies to promote, protect, and manage brands under the new culture.
Six rules for companies to promote, protect, and manage brands under the new culture.
Today we live in a consumer-controlled surveillance culture. Get used to it!
More important, prepare for it. Start building, where appropriate, your defensive branding strategy.
I often worry that in our sometime irrational exuberance over the benefits and wonders of conversation, brands are blind to what it truly means for consumers — our coveted buyers and lifetime revenue streams — to be constantly watching, monitoring, evaluating, and talking about us.
At the end of the day, consumers are monitoring brands and companies “for quality purposes” 24/7, far more attentively than companies recording toll-free calls. And that has enormous consequences for how we promote, protect, and manage brands.
Choose Your Weapon
The consumer lens into the brand closet is taking on infrared (define) levels of sophistication and clarity.
Aided by a growing proliferation of smaller and smaller devices, the gadgetry bursting from the CES fire hydrant last month, consumers have greater means than ever to watch our every move. They not only write about brand experiences, they capture them with photos, audio, and video. They aggregate evidence and use add-water-and-stir editing tools to fortify their stories.
Consumers capture, create, and circulate stories that implicate brands faster than a juicy Blair Waldorf rumor on Gossip Girl.
For every user-participation contest marketers create, consumers host a thousand brand-incrimination contests with levels of surveillance sophistication that would make most government intelligence agencies blush. Consequently, bad brand experiences — lame customer service, unsafe vehicles, gross hotel rooms, defective products, inept employees, mutant gadgets — are one “record” or ShareThis button away from viral exposure.
But we reap what we sow, so we’d better learn how to live with it. And we’d sure better figure out how to manage it or, where the surveillance culture rewards and reinforces our better half, take full advantage of it. The consumer-surveillance culture requires a fundamentally new mindset, starting with the following mission critical imperatives. So repeat after me, then write this on the whiteboard 100 times.
New Rules
Surveillance Has Its Benefits
Finally, remember the world of consumer surveillance and complete brand transparency can also work to the brand’s advantage. When consumers like what they see or feel good about experiences, they don’t crawl under a rug or duct-tape their mouths. No, they take their mini brand documentaries and put them on the public TV known as the Web. They seek validation from others, which creates link love, which in turn translates into optimized shelf space in search results.